As a general note -- I've enabled revision and log suppression for oversighters on all Wikimedia wikis.
This allows for the edit comment, page text, and username to be hidden individually, and optionally to choose whether to also hide it from sysops.
The two big differences from the traditional oversight system are:
* The entry remains in place in the history or log view -- it's not secretly vanished as though it never existed. The offending details only are suppressed from view.
* Log entries can be done as well as page edits.
This'll allow the existing local oversighter users to handle log-spam cases which previously requires developer intervention to clean up.
This system can be extended with a second tier so 'regular sysops' can also suppress individual revisions but can undo each other, but I haven't enabled it yet. (It's been in place for some time on http://test.wikipedia.org if you want to try it out.)
-- brion
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
As a general note -- I've enabled revision and log suppression for oversighters on all Wikimedia wikis.
This allows for the edit comment, page text, and username to be hidden individually, and optionally to choose whether to also hide it from sysops.
The two big differences from the traditional oversight system are:
- The entry remains in place in the history or log view -- it's not
secretly vanished as though it never existed. The offending details only are suppressed from view.
Any chance that after some burn-in period you can take all the old oversights and convert them into this new form (with all the hide bits set— since we can't automatically know what needed hiding)?
If for no other reason the continue existence of the old system makes explanations hard: "Oh no, we don't secretly vanish revisions and misattribute edits— for information we had to remove you can at least see their timestamps in the history." "What about this?" "Oh er.. hum.. you see, before some date, if they used THIS button.. err.."
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 5:07 PM, Brion Vibber brion@wikimedia.org wrote:
As a general note -- I've enabled revision and log suppression for oversighters on all Wikimedia wikis.
This allows for the edit comment, page text, and username to be hidden individually, and optionally to choose whether to also hide it from
sysops.
The two big differences from the traditional oversight system are:
- The entry remains in place in the history or log view -- it's not
secretly vanished as though it never existed. The offending details only are suppressed from view.
Any chance that after some burn-in period you can take all the old oversights and convert them into this new form (with all the hide bits set— since we can't automatically know what needed hiding)?
It would make more sense to do this on an as-needed basis, since it's not clear what level of oversight is required for any given oversight. It's best to be cautious here, and to avoiding fixing issues that a) may cause more problems, and b) don't actually exist yet, and may never come up.
Question: what's logging like for this? Are there public logs? Even just "User:So-and-so disabled bits Z, Y, and X of revision W, article [[Blah blah]]" would be very beneficial to have in the public eye, IMO.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:31 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
It would make more sense to do this on an as-needed basis, since it's not clear what level of oversight is required for any given oversight.
Thus the old ones need to be ported to "fully hidden" status.
It's best to be cautious here, and to avoiding fixing issues that a) may cause more problems, and b) don't actually exist yet, and may never come up.
The issue of transparency is a perpetual one, not one might or might not come up in the future. It would be of immediate and definite value for everyone to be assured that there are no longer any edits made in the past that have been completely hidden from everyone except an elite few, on a community-run encyclopedia that anyone in the world can participate in.
2009/1/29 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:31 PM, jayjg jayjg99@gmail.com wrote:
It would make more sense to do this on an as-needed basis, since it's not clear what level of oversight is required for any given oversight.
Thus the old ones need to be ported to "fully hidden" status.
Agreed. I see no real harm in converting already oversighted edits to the new system as fully hidden, and there is significant benefit. I'm not sure how difficult it will be to do (I'm not sure how the old oversight tool worked on a technical level), but if such a conversion is technically feasible, it should be done.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
Question: what's logging like for this? Are there public logs? Even just "User:So-and-so disabled bits Z, Y, and X of revision W, article [[Blah blah]]" would be very beneficial to have in the public eye, IMO.
Apparently there aren't.
// Put things hidden from sysops in the oversight log $logtype = ( ($nbitfield | $obitfield) & Revision::DELETED_RESTRICTED ) ? 'suppress' : 'delete';
Could I ask what the reasoning is for this? I can see the reasoning for CheckUser being almost entirely secret, but it seems impossible to me that there's any scenario in which the mere action of the removal needs to be hidden. Are there any objections to at least adding a summary-less public log entry in addition to the full private entry? Actually, if there are reasons why the summary couldn't be public too, I'd like to hear those.
2009/1/30 Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com:
Could I ask what the reasoning is for this? I can see the reasoning for CheckUser being almost entirely secret, but it seems impossible to me that there's any scenario in which the mere action of the removal needs to be hidden. Are there any objections to at least adding a summary-less public log entry in addition to the full private entry? Actually, if there are reasons why the summary couldn't be public too, I'd like to hear those.
Since the fact that it's been oversighted will be visible in the page history, it seems pointless for it to be hidden in the logs ("security by obscurity" is rarely worth it). It might be worth having a public and private summary, so details of what has been oversighted can be given for those with permission to know.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
At least for old entries, the summary could contain information related to what is being hidden, where did it come from...
Certainly we couldn't automatically publicize old summaries.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Jason Schulz JSchulz_4587@msn.com wrote:
When people know that rev X was removed at time Y, trolls go to the old xml dumps, find, and post the content, as I believe has happened in the past. It's much easier to do that with a public log.
This was arguably a legitimate reason for oversight, but for rev_deleted it no longer works. Anyone can get a list of the articles and timestamps of all deleted revisions under the new system, logged or no. The only reason I could see to keep it secret is to prevent people from easily figuring out who deleted which revision and when -- and I don't see any justification for that.
When people know that rev X was removed at time Y, trolls go to the old xml dumps, find, and post the content, as I believe has happened in the past. It's much easier to do that with a public log.
-Aaron
-------------------------------------------------- From: "Aryeh Gregor" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:12 PM To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Revision & log suppression for oversighters
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
Question: what's logging like for this? Are there public logs? Even just "User:So-and-so disabled bits Z, Y, and X of revision W, article [[Blah blah]]" would be very beneficial to have in the public eye, IMO.
Apparently there aren't.
// Put things hidden from sysops in the oversight log $logtype = ( ($nbitfield | $obitfield) &Revision::DELETED_RESTRICTED ) ? 'suppress' : 'delete';
Could I ask what the reasoning is for this? I can see the reasoning for CheckUser being almost entirely secret, but it seems impossible to me that there's any scenario in which the mere action of the removal needs to be hidden. Are there any objections to at least adding a summary-less public log entry in addition to the full private entry? Actually, if there are reasons why the summary couldn't be public too, I'd like to hear those.
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2009/1/30 Jason Schulz JSchulz_4587@msn.com:
When people know that rev X was removed at time Y, trolls go to the old xml dumps, find, and post the content, as I believe has happened in the past. It's much easier to do that with a public log.
If it's noted in the page history, they can do that anyway.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Jason Schulz JSchulz_4587@msn.com wrote:
When people know that rev X was removed at time Y, trolls go to the old xml dumps, find, and post the content, as I believe has happened in the past. It's much easier to do that with a public log.
As it was pointed out— the bitfields feature leaves the timestamps in the history.
Even ignoring that— If anyone wants it I'd be glad to send them a small easy to use python program that takes two XML dumps and produces a file including only the revisions existent in the first but missing in the second.
(The best way to address the underlying concern there is to never dump a revision less than 1 (2?) week(s) old— that should be easy add in the new dump system and would at least produce a time window where we can remove things before they hit the dumps.
But even that is far from foolproof: it's pretty easy to make a program that simple reads every revision as it comes in... Many people have done it before. I doubt the extra line of code to save the revisions will kill anyone.
Anyone can, but it doesn't seem as easy, which is what I said before.
-Aaron
-------------------------------------------------- From: "Aryeh Gregor" Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com Sent: Thursday, January 29, 2009 7:57 PM To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Revision & log suppression for oversighters
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:29 PM, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
At least for old entries, the summary could contain information related to what is being hidden, where did it come from...
Certainly we couldn't automatically publicize old summaries.
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Jason Schulz JSchulz_4587@msn.com wrote:
When people know that rev X was removed at time Y, trolls go to the old xml dumps, find, and post the content, as I believe has happened in the past. It's much easier to do that with a public log.
This was arguably a legitimate reason for oversight, but for rev_deleted it no longer works. Anyone can get a list of the articles and timestamps of all deleted revisions under the new system, logged or no. The only reason I could see to keep it secret is to prevent people from easily figuring out who deleted which revision and when -- and I don't see any justification for that.
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